Excerpt from Aucassin Et Nicolete The Object of the French poet was plainly to vary the monotony of a mere prose narrative. Not only so, but he has cleverly turned to account the special advantage of each style, prose and verse, and has thus given a distinct artistic value to the alternation. Thus, in the three sections of the work in which songs are introduced - the warder's song the song of the herd-boys the song of Nicolete, disguised as a minstrel (39) - the effect is made much more realistic by their being actually sung. However, the chance of introducing a real song could occur but seldom; but the utterances of grief or passionate feeling have often something of the nature of song in them, and we find introduced in the verse, as quasi-songs, various soliloquies or single speeches of the hero and heroine, either lamentations, or affirmations of love and constancy. No less than thirteen out of the twenty-one verse sections contain some utterance of this kind, which in many of them occupies almost the whole of the section. We may note, however, that it is the prose sections which tell almost the whole of the actual story; and although the verse sections are not merely interludes, there are only some half-dozen of them whose omission would interfere with its development. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.